Please, less chocolate in my brownies!

Home-made brownies are a delight, but most modern recipes use far too much
flour and chocolate.

The film star Katharine Hepburn was a great woman, both on screen and off. One day a neighbour asked the actress to have a word with his daughter, who was thinking of quitting college. Hepburn invited the young woman to tea and gave her three pieces of advice: '1) Never quit; 2) be yourself; and 3) don't put too much flour in your brownies.'

Hepburn was right. Almost everyone loves home-made brownies. But only when they are just so: not too dry and cakey, nor too wet and moussy. If you're looking for a cheap and easy way to woo someone you could bake up a batch of brownies: sweeter than roses, more homely and heart-felt than a box of truffles. You could adorn them with hearts (put a baking parchment heart on top, cover with icing sugar, and remove).

But first consider some of the pitfalls. Modern cookbooks make much of the danger of overcooking brownies. Ottolenghi: The Cookbook, for example, warns that overcooked brownies are 'worse even than overdone meat'.

It is true that, with many recipes, just a fleeting moment can make the difference between squidgy and cakey. It's disappointing to see all that lovely butter and chocolate turn solid. For sponge cake you can use a skewer to check that no gooeyness remains, but this doesn't work for brownies because goo is definitely desirable here.

The real problem, however, is that most modern recipes ignore Miss Hepburn's sage advice and use far too much flour, hence the tendency towards cakiness (Ottolenghi's use 280g to two eggs, a higher ratio than in many cupcake recipes).

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They also use insanely large quantities of chocolate. Nigella's recipe in How to Be a Domestic Goddess uses 375g dark chocolate: that's nearly four family-size bars. Fashionable brownies now seem to aspire to the richness of ganache. This is missing the point. Brownies were originally a soft and rich nut cookie rather than a sunken chocolate cake.

The very first recipe appeared in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896. As per Miss Hepburn's advice, the quantity of flour was small. This early American version was sticky with butter and molasses, with a nut on top of each one. It was not all about the chocolate.

I decided to make Katharine Hepburn's brownies to see how they measured up to my previous all-time favourite recipe from The Cranks Bible by Nadine Abensur (sadly out of print). Hepburn revealed her recipe in an interview with The Ladies' Home Journal in 1975. It goes roughly like this.

You melt 120g butter with a meagre 50g dark chocolate in a saucepan, add two beaten eggs, one cup of sugar (200g), vanilla essence, a pinch of salt, and chopped walnuts (one cup). Just a quarter of a cup of plain flour goes in too (about 45g). I baked it in a lined square tin at 170°C/340°F/gas mark 3½ for half an hour.

Hepburn's brownies come out paler than normal and smell like toffee. We loved the mellow praline taste from the butter and nuts, though we still – just – preferred the Cranks version (which is similar but with 20g less butter and 50g more chocolate, plus 1 tsp baking powder).

The great thing about the Hepburn formula is how forgiving it is. The brownies remain fudgy even if you overdo the timing a bit, thanks to the tiny amount of flour. That Katharine Hepburn was a wise woman. Not a bad actress, either.